Chapter 32
Sitting in his car in traffic, the General is on fire.
Even though his arms are still trembling from the adrenalin, he feels alight with strength – all but delirious from the electricity that this day, and the ones before it, has generated inside him.
When he was planning this, he had visualised it principally as an intellectual exercise – he’d had no idea quite how exciting its execution would be.
There have been horrors and difficulties, of course, but it has all been thrillingly unique.
And he has secret knowledge now. Few people walking the earth have experienced the sights and sensations that he has. Few people have killed so many.
And he understands now how and why his father had grown into the man he remembers: that dispassionate murderer of men. The act of killing is impossible to describe: a mixture of transgression and power; the sense that you should not do this quickly followed by the realisation that you can.
His father would be proud.
Up ahead, the traffic lights change, and the cars in front ease away. His hand shaking, the General releases the brake and moves forward with them.
The ghost of his father, now summoned, keeps pace in his head.
His father never killed a man directly, but make no mistake, there was blood on his hands: blood that was inches deep, impossible to scrub away even if the man had wanted to – which, of course, he never had.
The General’s father had loved his stories.
And he had told them far too frequently for his apparently dispassionate tone of voice to hide how much they meant to him.
One story has always stayed with him.
His father, words blurry with alcohol, would tell it to him at the dinner table while his mother washed up, pots clattering loudly in the sink, pretending not to hear.
It was about the factory in Bremen that had been bombed in the war.
His father’s doing. Without me, the man would tell his enthralled son, the war could easily have gone a different way.
It might have forked off down a less successful path.
Because his father was a code-breaker. Even now, retired and slower, he could crack any sequence his son came up with.
And years before, he had broken the code on transmissions that revealed the location of the pharmaceutical factory in Bremen.
Without him, they would not have been able to drop the pinpoint bomb that turned it and the village around it into a booming pillar of pitch-black smoke.
I watched it on the video, his father would say. A lot of men’ll tell you they saw faces in the smoke, but there wasn’t any. Bits of bodies maybe, but nothing else. That’s human nature, you see, to look for patterns. But it was just smoke.
Even as a boy, the General was old enough to know the reputation the strike had subsequently gathered: that it had become contentious, historically.
Had there really been biological weapons?
Of course, our country said. Of course not, said the enemy: it was a medical facility; as a result of its destruction, thousands died, many of them children.
Whatever the truth, neither side contested that the surrounding village was demolished by the bomb.
Innocent lives had undeniably been lost in the strike.
Vaporised bodies in the smoke, many of them civilian.
Now, the lights up ahead turn red. His car rolls to a halt and he cricks on the handbrake.
The lights change. Off he goes again.
Collateral damage, his father would tell him, raising the glass of whisky to his lips. Do you know what that means?
Yes.
It means it had to be done. It’s not nice when you have to kill civilians, but it was worth it. Their lives against ours. It was for the greater good.
The General would ask him: why were we at war, Dad?
His father would often shrug, maybe grunt into the last rounded triangle of liquor in his tilted glass, but he always gave the same answer.
Who knows?
As he follows the flowing traffic – this time through a set of green lights – the General remembers that answer.
As a boy, he was impressed by the ambivalence of it, the sheer matter-of-factness.
It seemed like a soldier’s answer. Now, as an adult, he recognises a deeper truth to the words.
There will have been many decent reasons underpinning the war on both sides, and probably many indecent ones, but attempting to untangle them is impossible and pointless.
The world rotates on an impenetrable clockwork of cause and effect, impervious to excavation.
Why did it happen?
We did it for resources, for territory, to protect ourselves. And so on. There are a million possible answers, but the truth is that they are never really intended to be explanations, only justifications.
Below the surface of his words, that was surely what his father had meant, wasn’t it.
That for a child killed in the village of Bremen – perhaps tilting their head and seeing a dot in the pale sky above them; perhaps even sensing the hush of death descending – what possible use was a justification, an explanation, a reason?